[I]t’s totally bizarre for Rick Perry to want people to think he might be carrying a pistol in his trousers. I can’t imagine he really is, but if he were, wouldn’t it be stupid beyond belief? I mean, imagine he’s in the middle of a crowd, getting mobbed by supporters, shaking hands and dishing out high fives … in that scenario, how in the world is he supposed to maintain control over his weapon? Obviously, he couldn’t. As a public figure constantly surrounded by people he doesn’t know, there’s just no way for Rick Perry to safely carry a firearm. It’s one thing for him to make the case for concealed carry permits, but it’s another thing altogether if he’s actually carrying as a candidate … it’s strange and it’s reckless.

if you are white brown black or saved or pagan, cyborg mormon or chosen here in rw, where weirdos and freaks and undesirable fat old lady folk dwell in the land of the goddess. we gather here as her domestic representatives. we are domestic goddesses. we are hundreds and hundreds and thousands of millions. we are the women who vowed at sinai to defeat the beast in the age of aquarius, and it is written in the future that we did so, as it was written in the past. we are the programmers. we ourselves!!! women are never reincarnated as men. only men are reincarnated as women. being a woman is your last life. this is written in the kaballah. men are always men until they evolve into being women. this they can do by merely serving the mother in them.

A small sign reading “Go vegan” was briefly hung around an Iowa State Fair butter cow Sunday morning, and animal rights activists took responsibility.

“We took this action to bring attention to the billions of animals enslaved for their milk, eggs and flesh,” the activists said in a statement. “The butter cow represents humankind’s tyranny over defenseless animals.”

Not to overplay the comparison, but today’s batch of older, white, racially-insensitive conservatives also assert less government is automatically good, federal taxation suspect, the U. S. president’s a crass, oppressive dictator — and decentralization would solve all problems. Curiously, today’s insurgents want to “take back their country” (just like southern Rebels), forever waxing nostalgic about fantasy golden ages (under Reagan). Not so different from earlier delusions of pre-abolition, ante-bellum plantation golden ages where happy slaves prospered because milk and honey flowed freely.

There is, so far, one great difference: millions were killed and maimed because the Confederacy took arms against its legitimate government. The two-year old Tea Party can’t yet match those casualties in its war against the majority — and against reality. But it’s still young.

[Rick] Perry’s flirtations with neo-Confederate organizations and symbols — ably documented by Justin Elliott — are so extraordinarily reprehensible that it should immediately and permanently disqualify him from being taken seriously for national office. The Confederacy was not a bunch of generally well-meaning dudes who went a little too far, it was a gang of racist traitors who launched a bloody war to defend a monstrously unjust institution. Having neo-Confederate sympathies in America should be equivalent to supporting the reconstituted Fascist party in Italy, or worse. It should not be considered something that 50 percent of the nation should be willing to look past, or even embrace.

And if that embracing happens it’ll be in part because of a press that won’t explicitly describe a disgusting sentimental attachment to a racist, brutal regime of oppression as anything other than an acceptable ploy to pick up Southern white support.